Baggage inteferes with business modeling

The past decade has provided us with staggering advances in business model innovations. We're now twice as smart as we're acting when we develop value propositions, delivery systems and revenue streams. Our emotional baggage continues to hang us up and sabotage innovations. We opt for misguided business model innovations instead of upgrades that would prove to be effective, valuable and revenue enhancing. Here's four ways that our baggage interferes with our creativity when considering recent advances in business models:

1. Cultivating unique resources: When we invest in core competencies that make new innovations possible, we develop the momentum to create an envisioned future. Our baggage advises us to divest burdensome assets, streamline processes and cut costs. Baggage predicts how we're in too much familiar danger to risk investing in long shots that push the envelope into unfamiliar ground.
2. Learning from customers: When we discover how customers are using what we sell in their own situations, we develop innovations to better serve their interests, solve their problems and produce desired outcomes. Our baggage refutes the idiosyncratic uses, perceptions and value constructs of the customers. The value of the product/service mix gets taken literally: it is what it says on the label and the same for everyone who buys it off the shelf.
3. Discovering uncontested market space: When we identify the overlooked needs of over/under-served non-consumers, we've created an opportunity to reinvent our value proposition and business model. Our baggage seeks to protect our profit margins, sales incentives and work flows by continuing to serve the high paying customers. Those cheap, whining, unappreciative non-consumers are too disaggregated, disinterested and demanding to consider as a potential market.
4. Creating a platform for a community of users: When we open our business model to crowdsourced motive power, our enterprise rapidly evolves in sync with it's market of creative customers. Our baggage cannot let go of its control of content, quality standards and status quo that gets messed up severely by groundswells and wikinomic contributions.

When considering all these ways that baggage can interfere with innovative business modeling, it appears the real challenge is psychological, rather than methodological. Until we clean up our acts, we will act against the best interests of our start-ups, customers and employees.